Carl Voyles was born in 1922 in Oklahoma. He attended the College of William and Mary, then Duke University and Johns Hopkins for medical training. In 1966 he interrupted his practice in St. Petersburg, Florida to serve as a volunteer physician in Vietnam with Project Hope, then later returned to active duty in the U.S. Navy, including a second tour ashore in Vietnam.
Now 'semi-retired,' he lives with wife, Joan, miniature daschund, Tia, and Tonkinese kitten, Tonk on an island off the coast of Florida, where he sees patients in an island clinic, sails his 25 foot sloop, Eight Bells, sketches, paints in watercolor and writes.
Several chapters of his non-fiction book, Vignettes of Vietnam, have been selected for publication in major magazines, including the Journal of the American Medical Association, The Retired Officer and the Cortlandt Forum.
One hundred miles to the south, a swimmer made his way laboriously through six foot waves in the South China Sea, his black hair twisting and swirling over his shoulders, a streak of white in his forelock. He had worked to within two hundred yards of the shore, swimming all the way from the island prison, Con Son... an almost impossible feat, considering the currents -- and the sharks.
He was naked except for a G-string made of hemp fiber. Much of the way he had left a thin crimson trail of blood from a bullet wound in his left thigh. The M-16 slug had missed the bone and larger blood vessels. His leg was numb; he hardly noticed the wound.
An older man had come by his cage that night, shortly before dawn. Tung couldn't be sure who it was because of the dark. The man had released the catch and unlocked the cage. Escape. He had said in Vietnamese. Only the one word, Escape!
But now the pain returned, a searing, jabbing tear each time he kicked his injured leg. The waves had become larger as he approached the shore. He was exhausted, ready to give up and float quietly back out to sea. Suddenly he felt a new , sickening pain in his other leg. He wheeled and saw a large gray shape circle away, then work its way back toward him, rolling on its side as it turned. He saw the white underside of a belly and huge jaws, opening slightly, as if in a grin, coming in again for the attack. He looked down. Part of his right foot was missing. A froth of red and white spread from where his legs flailed in the sea.
The shark disappeared for a few seconds, then reappeared, working in from behind. Tung screamed as he flexed his leg and kicked with all his remaining strength. Vice-like jaws sheared the kicking foot as the monster swept past, wheeled and circled.
Tung opened his eyes. For the moment, all he could see before him were monstrous green waves blowing white froth off their tops, lifting him up, then down. As he was lifted, his field of vision shifted, as if someone had flipped a TV screen away from a peaceful scene onto a scene of horror. Tung's brain was filled with an image of rows of triangular white teeth and the yawning chasm of a black throat, coming in for the kill.
Escape -- escape -- the words echoed as the shark came closer.
The huge gray thing had taken almost half his face with its last pass. Tung beat at the black pointed nose with his fists -- flailed against its coarse gray sides with the bloody ends of his legs. The shark retreated. Then Tung saw its dorsal fin cutting the blue-green water as a wave lifted him, as on a Ferris wheel, up toward the blue sky, then down a frothy slide into a trough where there was only a wall of water before his remaining eye.
When the next wave lifted him, the scene shifted. Just beyond that wave was a man, standing in the bow of a boat, a Vietnamese fisherman. In the stern of the boat, a young woman manned the tiller. The man had a gun. He had bent his head to one side and was sighting along the rusty barrel.
Shoot -- shoot me! Tung screamed toward the man. But the scream choked in his throat. It got no further than his lips. He closed his eyes.
The sharp crack of a rifle shot reverberated across the water. Another... then another.
The man in the boat was old. His gun was also old, a lever-action Winchester carbine he had found, abandoned by someone of the beach, rusty, but workable. There were three .30-.30 cartridges left in the magazine. He would save them, he had decided, for an emergency with which he would surely be faced some day in his boat at sea. The sea was a dangerous place, full of monsters, as well as of fish. Perhaps the three bullets would be used to repel pirates trying to steal his boat, or, worse, his daughter, Loa, who often accompanied him.
But, instead, he had kept them to spare the life of a man he had never seen before, a man bleeding, with no clothes, flailing in the sea.
He had saved them to kill a shark.
